ROME, ITALY

TWO DAYS LATER

Professor Tony Carafano smiled as the last of his students, two sophomores from the University of Texas, shuffled into the breakfast room of the two-star Hotel Romano and sat down.

“Good morning, ladies,” he said as he removed his glasses and placed them next to his cappuccino.

Carafano was a charming man in his early fifties. He had gray hair and a large, aquiline nose, a feature, he enjoyed pointing out, which was not only the Pre-Raphaelite ideal of male beauty, but which also placed him above the other summer abroad professors because he really had been born with a “nose for art.”

From Assisi, Perugia, and Cortona to Orvieto, Siena, and the hilltop town of Coricano, Tony Carafano had used his sense of humor to baptize his students in Italian art history. He believed that when they were having a good time, they learned more. He also believed that if you were traveling throughout the country by bus with twenty strangers for six weeks, the quicker you could get them all laughing the more enjoyable the trip would be.

He only had one rule: no matter how late the students stayed out the night before, they all had to be back by breakfast. They were good kids, sweet kids-the kind of kids that parents had a right to be proud of. None of them had broken his one and only rule. The fact that they hadn’t showed respect, and it was mutual. This was the best summer group he had ever had the pleasure of teaching. And as much as his colleagues complained about the “future of America,” these young men and women proved that America ’s future was bright, quite bright indeed.

Checking his watch, Carafano addressed the students. “I can see that some of you are moving a bit slower than normal this morning and I’m not going to inquire as to the reason. I think I know why.”

A wave of polite laughter swept the breakfast room. When it died down, he continued. “You’ve got ten minutes to load up on caffeine, aspirin, whatever it is that helps make you human, and then I want to see everyone in the lobby, checked out, with their bags ready to go. Okay?”

Heads nodded and with the scrape of chair legs across the tile floor, the students rose to get more coffee and return to their rooms to finish packing.

Depending on traffic, the professor knew that the drive south from Rome to Pompei would take a little over two and a half hours. Halfway there was a church with amazing mosaics that he wanted them to have plenty of time to study and sketch. After that, they had reservations for lunch at one of his favorite trattorias overlooking the Bay of Naples.

Half an hour later, the tiny hotel lobby was awash in a sea of suitcases and backpacks. As a handful of students made one last dash to the breakfast room for coffee, others helped the program’s bus driver, Angelo, load the bags into the belly of the bright yellow motor coach. In the chaos of everyone checking out, none of them noticed that one of the bags didn’t belong to their group.

After a final head count to make sure everyone was on board, Tony Carafano gave Angelo the okay to depart.

As the Italian maneuvered the coach through Roman traffic, the professor distributed the day’s itinerary. Walking down the aisle, he found his students engaged in their morning ritual of texting friends back home, checking e-mail, and listening to their iPods. Few were bothering to take in their last glimpses of one of the most beautiful and historically significant cities in the world.

With one of Rome ’s most popular landmarks drawing near, Carafano called his students’ attention to it. “If anyone’s interested, we’re about to pass the Colosseum on our left.”

Some of them looked up. Many, though, were too busy. It was a shame that even though they had all seen it before, a thing of such wondrous beauty should go ignored. Especially considering what was about to happen.

As the bus pulled even with the ancient arena, a spotter on a rooftop half a mile away removed a cell phone from his pocket and dialed the number he had been given.

Six seconds later, an enormous explosion rocked the city as the motor coach erupted in a billowing fireball.

FALLUJAH, IRAQ

THE NEXT DAY

As his Russian GAZ sped down the dusty road, Omar-Hakim was fuming. The local Iraqi National Guard commander had been engaged in plenty of blackmail schemes, but always as the perpetrator-never the victim.

Next to him sat the man who had ensnared him and who had broken his hand when he had gone for his gun. He never should have agreed to meet with him. In fact, he should have shot him on sight. But now it was too late. He was trapped and there was nothing he could do.

The man in question was a forty-year-old American who spoke Arabic as well as Omar-Hakim spoke English. He was five-foot-ten with light brown hair, blue eyes, and a well-built physique. A Navy SEAL who had been recruited to the White House to help bolster the Secret Service’s counterterrorism expertise, the man had become a previous president’s favorite weapon in the war on terror. But when that president had left office, the man’s tenure had expired. Now, he was working for a private organization.

His employer was a legend in the intelligence world and had spent the last year polishing and honing the skills of the man who, always deadly serious about his work, now approached his life with a renewed sense of vigor.

He had a sense that somewhere a clock was ticking down. It was due, in part, to a realization that his own time on the playing field was winding down, but there was something more to it. There was a sense of foreboding; a sense that a storm was gathering and picking up strength as it sped toward shore-his shore- America.

There wasn’t a specific act or event he could pin his sense of foreboding on. It was everything; the movements and chatter and unending determination by America ’s enemies to hit again and again and again. He and others like him believed that something else, something different was on the way, and they constantly reminded each other to keep their “powder dry.”

There were only two things any of them could do about it-hunker down and wait for it to happen, or get out there, locate the threat, and take the fight to the enemy head-on. Scot Harvath wasn’t the hunker-down-and-wait-for-it-to-happen type.

Looking at his GPS device, he activated his radio and said, “Two minutes. Stand by.”

“Roger that,” replied a voice from the neighborhood up ahead. “Standing by.” The snipers had been in place for hours. It was now nearing four a.m.

Even though he couldn’t see it, he knew the drone was still above them on station. Via the Combined Air and Space Operations Center, he radioed for a final situation report from the drone pilots back at Creech Air Force base northwest of Las Vegas. “Press box, are we still good to go?”

“That is affirmative,” came the reply. “Tangos one through four are still in place. Thermals show that the heat signatures inside the target have not changed.”

Harvath didn’t bother asking about the hostages. He knew why there were no longer any heat signatures from them.

As they turned the corner, the outline of their target could be seen silhouetted against the night sky. It was time to go to the next phase of their operation. “This is it,” he said over his radio as he set the GPS down on the seat next to him and adjusted his beret. “We’re going to sterile comms,” which meant from this point forward they would communicate only via a series of prearranged clicks.